Monday, July 22, 2013

I can’t do a series of beer-themed art without a green
piece, even if I did not reuse green beer bottles.I did repurpose a lot of the green packaging including cases
and six-pack containers.This
piece is both green for recycling and green as in the many, many bottles.

Green will be
included in my upcoming exhibit at San Francisco’s City Beer in October.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

To make it clear, I am not one of these San Franciscans
opposed to all growth and change. Right now we are in the midst of building
boom.I prefer urban in-fill
instead of suburban sprawl eating up more orchards, farms and open space.The thing that is disheartening about
our current building boom, is the generic quality of everything being
built.Everything has the same Pottery
Barn Modern look.It could be Santa Monica, Amsterdam or Brooklyn.It’s all the same.As the new street level real estate
will have the same chain stores and chain coffee shops, this might actually be
appropriate.

I remember all the excitement when Ikea came to the Bay Area
years ago (and yes I went and shopped too).It took less than a year for discarded Ikea furniture to
find its way to San Francisco curbs joining old computer monitors and printers.
Now, a decade later the influence of Ikea seems to be playing a new role on San
Francisco’s streetscape.

A walk down Market Street from the Castro to Civic Center
reveals construction in every block.These aren’t the faux industrial lofts of 2000. The new decade has
brought us kitchens for giants, or to be precise, every new building seems to
look like a stack of Ikea cabinets with a few subzero refrigerators thrown
in.Perhaps developers might
consider naming their projects after Ikea furniture, can you say Akurum Towers
or Abstrakt Place?

No, I don’t think we need to build fake Victorians to keep
the City’s character intact, but how about a little imagination and yes, some
buildings that blend in and reflect the City better than a stack of
appliances.Think Broderick Place built in 2007
and not the current behemoth that is NEMA.That one’s almost making Fox Plaza look
charming.

Friday, July 19, 2013

In recent years I have had little interest in the hyped-up,
blockbuster shows at the de Young.But finally they’ve hit a home run right out of the park.Richard Diebenkorn – The Berkeley Years,
1953-1966 does everything a major
museum show is supposed to do.There are pieces familiar to de Young regulars and a few from other Bay
Area Museums.Bulking up the large
show are plenty of rarely seen works from private collections as well as pieces
from museums, big and small, around the country.The de Young should be praised for the effort it took to
bring in so many single pieces from different museums.The show fills the museum’s entire
lower level special exhibition space and overflows to the main floor as
well.I believe this might be the
largest amount of space the de Young has ever devoted to a single artist – and
deservedly so for a Bay Area giant like Diebenkorn.

The show is one that demands more than one look – it’s up
until September 29, 2013.And, as
Scarlet Johansson never played Richard Diebenkorn in a movie, the crowds are
manageable.You can take in those
big pieces from across the room without a mob in the way entranced by their audio
tour.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Two nice pieces of mail art in the PO Box this week from Piro Rios in Puerto Rico — The
first includes some of my own material sampled and returned (more about that mailing
here).The
second was a bit of tropical warmth on a typical, gray, foggy San Francisco,
July afternoon.San Francisco is
the only place in America where we’re putting the heat on at night while the
rest of the nation is sweltering.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

It may not look like much, but this old plastic container
from Double Rainbow Ice Cream has been through a lot.This week marks the 16th Anniversary of my
departure from a downtown life and officially dedicating my life to making art.This container has been through it all, I started using it
sometime in the mid-1990’s for a water container for my brushes when I am
painting or gluing.Countless
brushes have come and gone, but this container has been through it all.Every now and then I peel off a bit of
the layered acrylic crud that builds up.So much of my art is about recycling
and this old container is part of the process.For now, I’ll keep on using it…

Saturday, July 13, 2013

When a friend visits from Australia and brings you a box of
35 Tim
Tam cookies you can’t let the packaging go to waste.Sure, I had to eat (and share) all of
those cookies.But I then when I
was done, it was time for a map, a map of Australia made from the box, and
there it is:

Friday, July 12, 2013

Back in April I sent out 100 pieces of art with the intention
that the recipients hide the pieces in books.More about that project here.I
love as new pieces of art come back to me with the instructions to hide them in
one of my many books.This one
came from the German artists Karin Fröhlich this week.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Alus, it’s the
Lithuanian word for beer.European
friends have been sending me beer labels from places like Luxemburg,
Switzerland and of course Lithuania.This is a latest in a series of beer-themed art and it’s dedicated to
all of us with the habit of drinking beer and then peeling labels off of the
empty beer bottles.Well, if you
cut those labels up and use the shiny pits in particular, you end up with
something like this.

Alus will be shown in
my upcoming exhibit at San Francisco’s City
Beer in October.

About Me

I am an artist living in San Francisco. I work primarily in mixed media, collage and landscape painting. My work has included maps, postcard-themed art and mail art projects. In 2013 I began a series called Collagescapes where I start painting paper with areas of color representing the palette of a specific place. Next I cut the paper into hundreds of small pieces, randomize the pieces and then reassemble them in various geometric patterns. Collagescapes are both landscape paintings and collages. They appear abstract but retain the color palette of the places they represent.
My new series is Time Travel Photos — handmade photo collages showing places in San Francisco where I have cut and sliced present-day photographs and interwoven photos of nature representing how the City looked before Europeans arrived. Each is an image of an urban space with the natural past emerging through. For example, creeks once again run through the Mission and dunes reappear in Golden Gate Park and tidal flats fill the Embarcadero.
My work has shown in over 40 venues, primarily in California but also in other locations in the United States and abroad. My artwork can be viewed at tofuart.com